synopsis

Claude Lanzmann spent eleven years spanning the globe for surviving camp inmates, SS commandants, and eyewitnesses of the Final Solution - the Nazi's effort to systematically exterminate human beings.
Without dramatic enactment or archival footage, but with extraordinary testimonies, SHOAH renders the step-by-step machinery of extermination: the minutiae of timetables and finances, the logistics of herding victims into the gas chambers and disposing of the corpses afterward, the bureaucratic procedures which expedited the killing of millions of people without mentioning the words "killing" or "people".
Through haunted landscapes and human voice, the past comes brilliantly alive.

member reviews

1 member review(s)

Shoah- witness to history
Sarahen
28 April 2010

member rating

Shoah is one of the most important films ever made. At around 9 hours long, broken into 4 parts, it requires committment to watch it all, but it is worth every minute of our time to see interviews with the witnesses of the Holocaust, people who will mostly have passed away by now.
Many books have been written on the holocaust, few of us have the time to read them, and they are largely scholarly works or autobiographical accounts of an individual's experience. Shoah delivers a completely different experience, the direct accounts of scores of people, from neighbours of Jewish people taken by the Nazis, to drivers of the trains that hauled hundreds of thousands of men women and children to their deaths.
Filmed over a number of years, the interviews are recorded with a simple hand held camera, and the results are often poor quality, but it is the spoken word that contains the value, each person telling their subjective versions of those traumatic years, in a way that is often confronting, and definitely not 'politically correct'.
The value of these personal accounts to history is inestimable, the value to the viewer of Shoah is that it ensures we never forget that which should never be forgotten.